Ruth Kligman Dies - from NYTIMES

WOW! the last link to one of the most tragic events in the history of art is dead . . . .

From The New York Times
March 6, 2010
Ruth Kligman, Muse and Artist, Dies at 80
By RANDY KENNEDY

Ruth Kligman, an abstract painter who for decades seemed to know everyone and be everywhere in the art world and who was the lone survivor of the 1956 car crash that killed Jackson Pollock, her lover at the time, died Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. She was 80 and lived in Manhattan.

Her death was announced by the artist Jonathan Cramer, a friend.

Ms. Kligman was riding in the front seat of the Oldsmobile 88 convertible the August night near the Springs, N.Y., when Pollock, after a day of drinking, ran the car off the road and flipped it, killing Edith Metzger, a young friend of Ms. Kligman’s, and himself. Ms. Kligman was thrown clear of the car and seriously injured.

“Edith started screaming, ‘Stop the car, let me out!’ ” Ms. Kligman wrote about that night in “Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock,” her 1974 book about their tumultuous relationship, which had started only a few months earlier when she met Pollock at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. “He put his foot all the way to the floor,” she wrote of the crash. “He was speeding wildly.”

Though it was to be the event that wrote Ms. Kligman irrevocably into the history of postwar art, she turned up frequently in its pages for many years afterward, less for her own work than for her role as a muse, lover, friend and subject of an impressive number of American artists.

Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe made portraits of her; Willem de Kooning, with whom she was romantically involved, titled a 1957 painting “Ruth’s Zowie,” supposedly after she made that exclamation upon seeing it; Andy Warhol mentions her in his diaries several times, and she wrote that they “had a terrific crush on each other” for many years; she was friendly with Jasper Johns, to whom she once proposed, and with Franz Kline, whose former studio on 14th Street became her home and the studio where she continued to paint almost to the end of her life.

Born in Newark on Jan. 25, 1930, Ms. Kligman said she had wanted to live the artist’s life since reading a biography of Beethoven at 7. She moved to New York when she was young and began to paint seriously in 1958, studying at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research and New York University.

She was 26 and working as an assistant at a small gallery when she met Pollock, who was 44, estranged from his wife, Lee Krasner, and losing his battle with alcoholism. Ms. Kligman wrote that he looked “tired out, sad,” and that “his body seemed as though it couldn’t stand up on its own.”

Ms. Kligman, by contrast, as described by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan in “de Kooning: An American Master,” their 2004 biography, “had about her the air of the earthy, voluptuous movie stars of the era, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren.” (She was portrayed by Jennifer Connelly in “Pollock,” the 2000 movie about his life; Ms. Kligman filed suit against the film’s makers, contending that they had violated her copyright in using parts of her memoir.)

After Pollock’s death, she began a relationship with de Kooning that lasted several years. She traveled with him to Cuba, Italy and France, fending off art-world accusations that de Kooning had taken up with her, as Mr. Stevens and Ms. Swan recounted, in part because he was “still competing with Pollock, even now, after Jackson’s death.”

Ms. Kligman said that de Kooning had called her “his sponge” because she asked him so many questions and soaked up so much about the New York School of painting, though her own work, which she exhibited throughout her life, drew from her Abstract Expressionist mentors only in the beginning.

She was married for seven years to a Spanish painter, Carlos Sansegundo, and lived briefly in Ibiza and later, off and on, in Santa Fe, N.M., though her life remained centered on the New York art world. She had no children: information about immediate survivors was not available.

“ ‘Art is my life,’ is my motto, ” Ms. Kligman wrote, and in an interview she once said that she knew better than many how hard such a life was. She recalled running into Kline at the Cedar bar and telling him that she had just finished what she thought was her best painting. He bought her a drink and told her, of the world: “They think it’s easy. They don’t know it’s like jumping off a 12-story building every day.”

What’s Left: Art Made by a Public at Alexander Gray Associates

Alexander Gray Associates inaugurated their new gallery space with an ambitious exhibition examining the art of public participation. What’s Left: Art Made by a Public is a cross section of art since the advent of conceptualism, showcasing performance art projects that are activated only through viewer engagement. Affected by the political and cultural turmoil since the 1960s, Allison Knowles, Karen Finley, Lorraine O’Grady and Paul Ramírez Jonas conceived spaces where public intervention simultaneously critiques the social order and contends with the traditions of the art institution. More perplexing is the exhibition’s investigation of how such performances can exist as both documentation and an archive, and by extension the possibility of these events to exist as objects in a gallery. What story will these objects tell of the performer and of the audience who participated?

The exhibition’s opening reception featured a reperformance by Alison Knowles of #2 Proposition (Make a Salad) from 1962. This iconic Fluxus performance elevates the banal activity of making and serving a salad to high art form. It has been reperformed continuously for nearly four decades with recent incarnations at the Tate Modern and the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art. The performance began – as it always has - with a Mozart duo for violin and cello immediately followed by Knowles and three assistants chopping away at lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots, amongst other items. According to the artist, the Mozart remains the same but the salad ingredients are different in each reperformance. At first the audience seemed unaware of the connection between the finely attired musicians and the aged Knowles who was adorned with an old cooking apron. Little to no attention was given to the salad preparation until the gallery was filled with the scent of fresh cut onions and peppers. The ingredients were combined in two large plastic vats, seasoned and distributed. As the audience furiously ate away at their salads (possibly the only thing that most of them have ate all day . . . some of them were so skinny . . . it is a sin) individuals became a collective we. We were there to watch Knowles, we were there to eat the salad she prepared, we were there to participate as have others in a performance whose potential for reincarnation are limitless. The strangeness of making a salad being viewed as art quickly gave way to a sense of tradition and continuity perpetuated by the reperformance.

The three other performances in the exhibition were not represented by their original incarnations as performances rather by documentation and artifacts. Despite the limiting qualities of these materials, they testify to the potential that participatory performances have in stimulating audiences from passive to active. Lorraine O’Grady is represented by Art Is . . ., which answered the challenge from an acquaintance that “avant-garde art doesn't have anything to do with black people." So in September of 1983 during Harlem's African-American Day Parade the artist took avant-garde performance directly to a largest congregation of blacks in New York City. The bohemian artist was not so such much invading the party then she was a wedding crasher swept up in the merriment of celebration. O’Grady, and a group of 15 women artists dressed in white, hopped on and off a slow moving float and framing people in the crowd with a 9 x 15 ft. antique-styled gold frame. Anyone “framed” by the frame was declared a work of art. The photo documentation of the performance shows the playfulness of both performer and audience as they smile and laugh at the prospect of being considered a work of art. Much akin to Duchamp's readymades, the artist is not only a creator of art but a creator of taste, dictating what constitutes art. The field of art is opened beyond the confines of the institution, and is especially poignant as it is a black female artist who dictates the framing. The performance was not advertised to the art community at large, despite having received a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts. Thus, O’Grady was able to create a performance outside the boundaries of the art establishment that was not critical of a community, rather acted to celebrate and engage a community that has long been alienated by the avant-garde. This engagement is done by populist means, not through the jargon of post-modernist practices.

Karen Finely’s work takes a darker turn in her 1991 project Momento Mori. Originally presented at the Kitchen and LA MoCA, the public was invited to tie multi-colored ribbons to an aged wrought-iron gate in memory of someone who had died of AIDS. Finley’s work has noticeable aged as the thousands of ribbons that cover the gate have faded. As well, the names and prayers written on the ribbons are barely visible. These traces are stark reminders of those who were impacted by the AIDS crisis. The work is an emotional footprint even in its dilapidated state, acting in one regard as a memorial to the dead while also serving as an archive of individuals who became communities bonded together by a deadly disease.

Paul Ramírez Jonas' Talisman I (2008–2009) is the most recent project in the exhibition. The original performance is represented by a triptych containing the objects from his public art work in the 28th São Paulo Biennale. Deriving his performance from the Biennale’s theme of “in living contact,” Jonas had hundreds of Sao Paulo residents exchange their house keys for those of the Biennale’s main building. He required each participant to sign a contract that detailed in several different language the rules and regulations of access to the exhibition space. The keys are symbolic of the bonds that can open and close out a society to the artistic process much like O’Grady’s golden frame. The contract, which each participant was free to enter into, is premised on the artist’s longstanding interest in exploring the interactive bonds between art work and the public, where one must give in order to receive. This is the moral which unites all the works represented in this small, yet powerful exhibition: for giving their time, their interest, their participation, in turn audiences were given the opportunity to be part of a community of participants whose gestures are part of a fleeting moment. While documentation and subsequent reperformances attempt to capture the atmosphere of what originally took place, the experiences are unique to those who made them possible.

Ida Appelbroog at Hauser and Wirth

Hauser and Wirth’s press statement for the new Ida Appelbroog exhibition, Monalisa, draws parallels between the artist and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). Unfortunately, Woolf’s room for seclusion and creativity was only possible for those who could afford it. For everyone else the only place to find solitude is the bathroom. And that is where this exhibition begins in 1969, in a bathroom.

Creating a mythic vision of her creative impulse, Appelbroog sets the scene of living in southern California with her husband and four children and not having a space to call her own. So she retreats to the bathroom as a “little sanctuary” where for two to three hours each evening she could go about sketching her crotch from reflections in a mirror. She produced some 160 drawings in a ritualistic act akin to Tee Corinne’s “Cunt Coloring Book.” Corinne asked women to not only be comfortable looking at vaginas, but also to take a good long look at their own and even draw and color them. This exercise would allow women to understand themselves and their bodies. Appelbroog’s exhibition reinvigorates the feminist gusto for the taboo.

The exhibition presents a certain bravado that has only just recently been resurrected in the history of feminist art. Art institutions are beginning to recognize these pioneering works from the 1960s and 1970s that challenged the social order. As such Lynda Benglais, Ana Mendiata and Hannah Wilke have enjoyed a renaissance of interest and scholarship. Like them, Appelbroog’s images are a reversal of traditional representations of womanhood. They are Courbet’s Origin of the World turned in on itself. No longer do we gaze at the vagina, but now the vagina gazes at us. Some of Appelbroog’s images are highly detailed with pubic hair accurately rendered, while others are much more abstract with elegantly curved lines sweeping across the paper.

The centerpiece of this exhibition is a room-sized wooden structure covered with more than one-hundred facsimiles of the vagina images. Applebroog scanned, enlarged and digitally manipulated the drawings on vellum and soaked them in translucent coats of blues, yellows and reds. The bathroom sanctuary gives way to an impenetrable fortress with the haunting gaze of vaginas watching as visitors peer into a space they can never enter. There is no door but only gaps between the paper and bare wooden structure of the room. These slits offer a view of a large painting, Monalisa, which hangs on an interior wall. The painting made in deep red is of a slouched over figure, looking like a rag doll, with its legs spread open. Like the wallpapered vulva images, the doll gazes uncomfortably at the viewer as if disturbed by their presence. This guarded room has parallels to Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, which was made public for the first time in 1969 the same year these drawings were begun. However, again, like Courbet’s famous canvas, the gaze has been reversed. Duchamp’s lifeless figure spreads her legs but we cannot see her face, masking if she is uncomfortable or complacent in the peep show. Appelbroog’s figure, on the other hand, challenges us to keep looking and follows us as we exam the room that we are not permitted to access. The artist brilliantly weaves together her past and present. By including digitally made drawings, she demonstrates that artists even in their late years can produce new and surprisingly engaging work. Monalisa is not a variation on a theme but Appelbroog’s own renaissance in the art world.

and we are back

so i have been ignoring this blog, but i am back . . . . .

LAYOFFS!

READ THIS NOW!

How is this possible? Really? That many people? It is so disturbing how museums are being forced to just get rid of their employees. I know these are tough times, but this is just a little too much for me. Then you see the reality of the situation when you read this:

"An omnibus bill for the current fiscal year introduced on Monday by the House Appropriations Committee includes $10 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which would bring each of their annual budgets to $155 million. The allocations, which have not been acted on by the House and Senate, follow the approval on Feb. 13 of $50 million in additional funds for the National Endowment for the Arts in Congress’s economic stimulus bill. In the previous fiscal year, the endowment’s budget rose to $144.7 million from $124.4 million."

So out of the billions upon billions of dollars being bumped out by the stimulus package they could only find a meager $20million combined for America's federal arts and humanities programs? Really? This drives me crazy. During the Depression Roosevelt made sure that the arts were appropriately funded - WPA - and because of that America produced an unprecedented amount of art. The WPA also contributed to America's central role in the art world in the early/mid 20th century.

Marco Evaristti is at it again . . .

This guy is just crazy . . . yet, at the same time I find his work quite compelling for its questioning of moral standards within Western culture. This artist is also responsible for using his own body fat to make meatballs, painting a glacier red and debuting a line of clothing for death-row inmates. Though my personal favorite is when he filled a gallery with blenders. Each blender was filled with water and a gold fish - it was up the audience/viewer to decide if they would puree the fish or not . . .

Courtesy of The Art Newspaper
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=16027

Death row inmate gives his body to art

By Clemens Bomsdorf | From News | Posted: 2.9.08

COPENHAGEN. Gene Hathorn, a convict on death row in Texas, has agreed to give his body to the Danish-based artist Marco Evaristti, should his final appeal against execution fail. Evaristti plans to turn Hathorn’s body into a work of art. “My aim is to first deep freeze Gene’s body and then make fish food out of it. Visitors to my exhibition will be able to feed goldfish with it,” Evaristti told The Art Newspaper.

Hathorn, 47, has been on death row since 1985, after being found guilty for the murder of his father, step-mother and step-brother. At an earlier trial Hathorn’s friend, James Lee Beathard, was also convicted for the murders after Hathorn testified against him.

Hathorn later recanted his testimony but Beathard, who protested his innocence to the end, was executed by lethal injection in 1999 because of a Texas law which prevents the presentation of new evidence after 30 days have passed from the original trial.

In the last year Evaristti has visited Hathorn several times at his prison in Livingston, Texas. “I wanted to raise awareness of the fact that there are people killed legally in our Western civilisation,” said the artist. “A lawyer put me in contact with Hathorn and after a few meetings I suggested that I use his body and he [said he] wished that I would.” He does not think that his plan is cynical or unethical. “The real problem is legally killing people,” he said.

Evaristti says that US lawyers doubt whether Hathorn’s testament, which makes the artist the heir to his body, is valid. “But we are confident [that we can] solve this issue before Hathorn is executed,” Evaristti said. Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department for Criminal Justice (TDCJ), told The Art Newspaper that a death row prisoner “can select a person to handle the disposition of their remains”. She added that the TDCJ had no interest in who that person may be.

Evaristti is helping to finance Hathorn’s appeal by selling drawings made by the convict in prison. “I don’t think his appeal will work, so if he is executed, we will ship the body to Germany, deep freeze it there and turn it into fish food,” Evaristti told The Art Newspaper.

He said he was already in contact with a company that would be willing to assist him, but declined to identify it. The proposed exhibition will consist of a huge aquarium filled with hundreds of goldfish. Visitors would be able to feed the fish using food made from Hathorn’s body. A venue for the exhibition has yet to be decided.

The exhibition is part of Evaristti’s wider project against capital punishment. In August he presented a clothing collection called “The Last Fashion” to coincide with the Copenhagen International Fashion Fair. Fifteen models wore dresses designed by Evaristti. He says they are for death-row prisoners to wear on their execution day. They will be offered as mail-order items to prisoners on death row in the United States.

“The fashion show will be forgotten in a short time. People went there, looked at it and were amused. But I want [there to be] a lasting impact and therefore I’m using Hathorn’s body,” Evaristti said. He has also designed an execution bed to be shown at the Art Copenhagen art fair this month (19-21 September).

Evaristti came to international attention in 2000 when he placed goldfish in electric blenders filled with water. Visitors to the exhibition at Denmark’s Trapholt Art Museum could choose to press a button, turn on the blenders and kill the fish. In January 2007 he held a dinner party where the main course consisted of meatballs partly made with fat removed by liposuction from his own body. In June last year he was arrested while trying to paint the peak of Mont Blanc red as a protest against “environmental degradation”.

In April we reported plans by German artist Gregor Schneider to show a person dying as part of an exhibition. “My aim is to show the beauty of death,” Schneider told us. He said he would like to stage the exhibition at the Haus Lange Museum in Krefeld, Germany. The museum declined to comment.

I love cartoons . . .

While wasting this beautiful Saturday inside reading I managed to watch a little TV. One of my favorite new cartoons is The Mighty B on Nick. It is a great show about a ten year old girl who is on the hunt get be the best Honeybee scout. In a recent episode she and her friend Penny became addicted to crashing bat-mitzvahs . . . now at first this may seem a bit too sophisticated for the target audience, but it was done really (really) well and was hilarious. There was absolutely no underhanded anti-semitism. Basically the girls get a thrill in crashing this over the top and very decedent parties. I could not stop laughing, it was just so unexpected and tastefully done. In another episode she tries to rid her town of zucchini, in fear that it destroy her chances of earning more badges for her scouting group. As she stands before the city council arguing her case, the mayor asks: "Do you have any legitimate reason?" To which Bessie replies (in a stern voice): "Reason is the enemy of democracy." It was amazing!

According to Wikipedia:

Bessie Higgenbottom - The title character of the series. She is very devoted to her troop and tries her hardest to earn every Honeybee badge, believing that she will become "The Mighty B" if she collects them all. In fact, she constantly wears her uniform, beats her sales record every year while selling taffy (as opposed to girl scout cookies), and owns far more badges than any other scout. Bessie is a very confident, caring, organized, but hyperactive and talkative girl. According to a promotional advertisement, she said that she is lactose intolerant and has a flatulence problem.

Good Public Art vs. Bad Public Art

While enjoying the last spectacle of fireworks in Coney Island for the summer, my friend and I both agreed that the caliber of criticism in the New York Times is severely declining. Once the authority on Books, Art and Movies, it seems that their writers are lagging behind and tend to be a bit populist in giving their approval (i.e. their love of the new Will Smith movie Hancock, really? come on!). A great example of this is in the Arts section in a recent piece by Roberta Smith (go figure) regarding the excitement of recent public art projects. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/arts/design/24smit.html

Smith attributes the survival/revitalization of public arts to Jeff Koons. She speaks of him as if he were at triumph Caesar slaughtering the Gauls and claiming all of Europe as his own - to be blunt, she should get her finger out of his ass and stop milking his prostate. In discussing his "Balloon Dog" now on view at the MET(on the roof garden), she writes, "The dogs imbue a greatly enlarged child’s party toy with the tensed stillness of an archaic Greek horse while subtly evoking various bodily orifices and protrusions." Tensed stillness of a Greek Horse? Need we remind her that at no point in the process of creating his work is Koons involved. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I was told that Koons doesn't come up with the idea (ahh! talentless hacks in the art world and the critics who love them always entertain me!). Moving on, Smith then goes on to psychoanalyze the animal and as a result gives too much credit to the artist: "Koons’s art enacts the basic exchange of public sculpture. We literally see ourselves in his alluring reflective surfaces; his buoyant forms reach deep into our childhood with its accompanying feelings of hope and optimism. " The only problem is that this sculpture comes in all different sizes, including outdoor (as seen here), pedestal and even table top (which can be purchased at the MoMA, MET and Whitney gift shops). So, I wouldn't necessarily go as far as saying that Koons is active in the dialogue between viewer and work of art, rather he is active in the dialogue between consumer and cold-hard cash.

Though I think that Smith goes from bad to worse,and even insulting when she states, "He broached weightlessness from the start, first with simple Duchampian ready-mades: plastic inflatable flowers and bunnies; vacuum cleaners set aglow by fluorescent light tubes and sealed in Plexiglas cases; and finally basketballs afloat, embryolike, in aquariums." Yes, Koons is indeed Duchampian but he is a perverted Duchampian. Koons is mainly seeking profit with little to no political commentary on the art world or the world at large. Instead his work is merely a gross exaggeration of Dada and Pop art. He is another example of the "institutional avant-garde." Whereby, his work is only considered edgy and shocking because the art institution that supports him tells us so. What is so edgy about an over size balloon-dog? I am not sure, but it does make a great photo for your facebook page!

Smith only mentions a truly great work s of public art in passing.- among them Mark Wallinger’s 1999 “Ecce Homo,” a life-size figure of Jesus in London's Trafalgar Square. In one of the most widely trafficked spaces in the city, the figure stood outside the National Gallery, located halfway between Parliament and Buckingham Palace. The work occupied the fourth plinth - which has now become a space for cutting edge and very successful contemporary public art. Thoughtful and creative, Koons should be taking notes or at least doing some google based research on this. Wallinger said his sculpture of Christ was not meant to be perverse or tongue in cheek. 'I wanted to show him as an ordinary human being Jesus was at the very least a political leader of an oppressed people and I think he has a place here in front of all these over sized imperial symbols.' Another great work of public art that is completely ignored by Smith also occupied Trafalgar Square's plinth - Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant, 2005. Alison Lapper, a friend of Marc Quinn, was born with no arms and shortened legs due to a chromosomal condition called Phocomelia. “I regard it as a modern tribute to femininity, disability and motherhood,” said Alison of Quinn's work. “It is so rare to see disability in everyday life – let alone naked, pregnant and proud. The sculpture makes the ultimate statement about disability – that it can be as beautiful and valid a form of being as any other.” Both sculptures, truly re-imagines the political role of public sculpture -not through humor or wit, but through insightful investigation of the human psyche and relationship between space, art and viewership. The emotions imbued in each of these works are so much more powerful then anything Koons could imagine. I think it would do a world of good for Smith to reevaluate the public art that she has ignorantly ignored.

I am interested in writing more about these two works, but it is now 2 AM and would need to gather my thoughts a bit more . . .

CALIGULA!

So after my roommate proclaimed that he is interested in making movie shorts for movies that don't exist I had to show him this work by Francesco Vezzoli. Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula is a short film in the form of a fake movie trailer that spoofs the original Caligula (the all but doomed and terribly curated) 2006 Whit. It features an all-star cast (including the "ravishing" Helen Mirren, Benicio Del Toro, Karen Black), and promises to be even more decadent and depraved than the original film. This film made a huge splash when it premiered at the Venice Biennial, and managed to make its way to America via the (doomed and terribly curated) 2006 Whitney Biennial. It was a hit with audiences, though some admitting were dumbfounded: "will there really be a new movie? is there something I am missing?" But for those who kept up, Vezzoli's work is a provocative (very provocative) demonstration of art's continuing ability to remain witty and self-assured.

Despite all the glamour and big budget style of the (toga costumes by Versace) trailer there is a witty, yet pointed political message. In the opening scene Gore Vidal, sitting in a director's declares: "Every point in human history has been dark." Only to be followed by Mirren's proclamation that "We stole for ourselves the wealth of the world," as she guides two slave boys dressed in mesh gold tunics (revealing their genitalia). The commentary is telling of its time and Vidal (who wrote the script for the trailer) is one of the Bush's administration's most vocal critics (who is staple of many political television and radio shows). Yet all of this commentary is hidden well through a thick layer of wit and sex - and more sex than anything. There are a plethora of sex scenes and - like a good trailer - only offers a small glimpse of the wild orgies of homo-and-heterosexual sex scenes. A favorite: after Karen Black says to another character "I hear you have a taste for young boys," the scene quickly changes to an orgy of no less than a dozen naked oily men engaging in the pleasures of a bacchanal - one that Caligula himself would have been proud of. The backdrop could not be any more suitable: a badly decorated California-type mansion filled with replicas of Roman statues. I guarantee that you will come back to watch this again and again, just to make sure you caught every scene - and not because I am perverted, because it is just too good to miss.

I also enjoy Milla Jovovich's performance. Despite how attractive she is, she is just a terrible (TERRIBLE) actress. And in the trailer she is at her worse, but I am not sure if this is intentionally. When I first saw this at the Biennial I was laughing hysterically because her inability to act was just a riot. Unfortunately, after watching this too many times, I am still not sure if she is intending to come off as a bad actress or not - I mean, is she a good enough actress to parody herself? I guess it will require even closer viewing next time. Though the best part of the whole film is the surprise ending. The short offers a surprise ending. After Mr. Vidal tells viewers that the "film" will be "coming soon to a theater near you," the credits roll and the screen goes dark. Just when you think it is over, a surprisingly sober Courtney Love suddenly appears as the fake film's actual Caligula to deliver a brief soliloquy. This is a role of lifetime for Love, she is at her best her (and I am not being sarcastic) as she declares before the camera: "How lonely it is to be a god."




And the Original trailer for the 1979 version, with the warning: "For mature audiences only."

Paul McCarthy, Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement

Paul McCarthy’s “Spinning Room” (2008).


The McCarthy Installation slash mini retrospective at the Whitney is a must see. This has been a very slow season for the art world - with sleepy shows at the Guggenheim and MoMA. Luckily McCarthy serves up enough excitement and entertainment to please any art audience. It was great to see some of his early films from the 1960s/1970s - as there are no other venues for them to be screened. They are wonderfully installed along side some performative-photographs as well as three large scale installations. TimeOut New York rightfully declares: "The Whitney connects the past and present of Paul McCarthy’s work." This fusion of the past and present showcases the evolution of the artist while providing insight into the conceptual link between his early and current work.

I went into the show a bit skeptical. The description on the wall at the beginning of the exhibition declared that architecture will be used to: "to create perceptual disorientation in the viewer through spinning mirrors, rotating walls, projections, and altered space." But on the advice of a good friend I decided to suspend my disbelief and over critical perception and enjoy the art for what it was - AND I DID! His work goes beyond spectacle and truly does alter the perception of space and viewer's relationship to space. Ken Johnson of the NY Times is right in suggesting: "Over and over Mr. McCarthy returns to the human fact that we are inescapably at the mercy of what our senses tell us about the world and what our brains manage to make of that information. We may go out of our minds, but we can never get out of our heads." Even after a week I am still struck by the sounds and sights of the installations. I am looking forward to a second visit - and, ultimately, a different experience.


Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement
Three Installations, Two Films

on view till 12 October 2008

This exhibition brings together a group of new and rarely seen works by Paul McCarthy (b. 1945), one of the most influential American artists of his generation. The show focuses on a core strand of McCarthy's work: the use of architecture to create perceptual disorientation in the viewer through spinning mirrors, rotating walls, projections, and altered space. In Bang Bang Room (1992), the space almost seems to come alive as the walls of a free-standing domestic room move slowly in and out, the doors in each wall wildly slamming open and shut. In Spinning Room (2008), first conceived in 1971, but being realized for the first time for this show, live images of viewers are rotated and projected onto double-sided screens that appear infinitely reflected on four surrounding mirrored walls, enclosing the viewer in a wildly disorienting space. In Mad House (2008), being created for this show, a room spins disconcertingly on its axis. Two recently rediscovered films by McCarthy, one made in 1966 and one in 1971, reveal the artist's interest in perceptual puzzlement from the very beginning of his career.

Shit, Andres Serrano

"SHIT (Heroic Shit)" (2008)

A great new show is about to open on September 4th at Yvon Lambert Gallery - I am definitely going to the opening, this will be a killer show!


From the Press Release:

Serrano’s work focuses on universal themes such as bodily fluids, religion, sex and death. In this new series he
continues his investigation of bodily functions through color photographs of excrement produced by a motley of animals. The photographs are formally constructed and demonstrate Serrano’s considerable technical skill while analyzing subject matter that might make some viewers squeamish. The artist treats the feces to his familiar bright psychedelic backgrounds and titles that demonstrate his keen sense of humour. The photographs are simultaneously repellent and fascinating, allowing the viewer to inspect the manure without the deterrent of odor or other sensual aggravation. Although the theme is considered taboo, excrement has a discernable documentation in the history of art. In 1961 Piero Manzoni’s unveiled his “Merda d’Artista” metal cans that supposedly contained the artist’s stool, priced according to weight. Karen Finley smeared herself with symbolic feces and even Andy Warhol was quoted in the National Review saying that he would like to market his own excrement as jewelry (he felt it was merely a matter of tasteful packaging).

Serrano does nonetheless confront the topic more directly than most. We recoil from his larger than life images of human and animal waste (an evolutionary and biological response to the diseases that are the consequence of bad sanitation. We are programmed to know this refuse is dangerous to handle or ingest). Once the viewer recovers from the initial shock of the images, they are left to curiously study this eccentric body of work. Who could have imagined that animals produce such an array of textures, shapes and color? Serrano gives us a selection of “shits” that he dubs Good Shit, Bad Shit, Bull Shit, Hieronymous Bosch shit, Romantic shit and Deep shit, humorous, insightful and often literal titles which further illustrate Serrano’s provocative point of view.